The 2013 Pension 40: Caitlin Long

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Caitlin Long

Head of Corporate Strategies and Pension
Solutions

Morgan Stanley

General Motors Co. and Verizon Communications made
pension history last year when they transferred a
collective $36 billion of liabilities to
Prudential Financial. Caitlin Long,
New Yorkbased head of corporate strategies and
pension solutions at Morgan Stanleys investment
bank, advised both companies. Although smaller
corporations had moved liabilities off their balance
sheets before, the sheer size of the deals made the
transfers much more difficult and changed the
requirements. Long helped GM and Verizon understand the
liabilities within their capital structures and
determine the best pension funding strategies.
This is a logical evolution of the history of
corporate pension plans: that companies would pursue
exits from their frozen funds in particular, says
Long, who got involved well before consultants and
independent fiduciaries did. It was just the GM
pension team and a whiteboard, she recalls.
Wyoming-raised Long, 44, who has a JD and a
masters of public policy from Harvard University,
started out in life insurance equity research at Credit
Suisse Group, where she restructured pension subsidiary
Winterthur Group for then-CEO John Mack in 2002. From
2003 to 2007 she worked with life insurers on risk
management. In 2007, having become chief executive of
Morgan Stanley, Mack saw that changes were coming to
pensions and offered Long a position at the firm to
focus on that business.

An allocation to international bonds exposes Target Retirement Fund investors to an asset class thats not only influenced by different interest rate and inflation dynamics than U.S. bonds, but which also provides a larger opportunity set of credits.